“...we have some history together that hasn’t happened yet.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

SO LONG, JOHN UPDIKE

John Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009) novelist, poet, essayist, short story writer, art critic, prizewinner, and hat waver. The publication of his book Rabbit, Run, in 1960, established Updike as a novelist of the first rank, and introduced us to Harold "Rabbit" Angstrom, who would appear every decade to take America's pulse.

"In his most resonant work, Mr. Updike gave 'the mundane its beautiful due,' as he once put it, memorializing the everyday mysteries of love and faith and domesticity with extraordinary nuance and precision. In Kodachrome-sharp snapshots, he gave us the 50’s and early 60’s of suburban adultery, big cars and wide lawns, radios and hi-fi sets, and he charted the changing landscape of the 70’s and 80’s, as malls and subdivisions swallowed up small towns and sexual and social mores underwent a bewildering metamorphosis."

-Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times. For the rest of her appraisal, click here.